Over the past decade, the field of information security has grown and evolved significantly. Cyber-attacks pose a serious threat to critical infrastructure and IT services. However modern societies strongly are highly dependent on the proper functioning of these IT systems. The diversity and the complexity of the underlying scenarios for cyber-attacks have become so great that a strong specialisation in IT security is needed to provide adequate responses to possible threats.

One of the  EMCL's main research areas in IT security is the development and analysis of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS). These techniques aim to monitor and detect malicious activities and policy violations in a given network and/or system. The detection techniques considered are based on methods related to data mining in the context of big data. Thus,  this research topic is in line with EMCL's original activities in the area of data analysis and uncertainty quantification.

EMCL regularly offers lectures and seminars on IT security at both introductory and advanced levels.